Network TV Takes On Police Corruption

By the end of 2015, the year of Laquan McDonald, Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray, and so many others, could any news-attuned, free-thinking American claim her faith in the police and the justice system remained intact? I think not, and appropriately, our first week back at the grind in 2016 brings us two new network TV shows that reckon with the dubious methods law enforcement sometimes uses to keep the peace.

But if the recent spate of high-profile police corruption and brutality cases offer a timely peg, neither Fox’s Second Chance nor NBC’s Shades of Blue come down on those officers of the law who cross the line. On the contrary, both new shows seem to agree to different extents that a certain amount of vigilantism comes with the territory of delivering justice.

The poster for Second Chance, which premieres January 13 (though its pilot has been available online since Christmas), bears the intriguing log line “Death gave him a second chance at life,” and features an image of the show’s beefy star, Robert Kazinsky, skimpily clad in boxer briefs, suspended in a water tank, arms outstretched in a pose that can be described only as Jesus-y. Much like Jesus, Kazinsky’s Jimmy Pritchard gets to rise from the dead. Comparisons basically end there.

In his heyday, Pritchard was sheriff of Seattle, protector of his city. Then he was caught in an evidence-planting scandal and forced to step down. We meet the disgraced ex-lawman, his reputation ruined, as he’s living out his old age in a sleazy apartment, bottle in hand, butt planted in a Barca lounger, keeping company with prostitutes. By the time he dies—thrown from a bridge by men he catches breaking into his son’s house, a murder made to look like a suicide—Pritchard’s been reduced to a local cautionary tale.

It’s difficult to fully recount the Cirque du Soleil–worthy plot contortions that account for the Sheriff’s titular second chance. Suffice it to say, there’s a very 21st century Facebook/Google–like entity run by a pair of creepily close fraternal twins, one of whom is dying of cancer, the other of whom is searching for a cure, and Pritchard’s highly unusual genome may hold the answer. Selfishly, Otto, the socially maladapted healthy twin, procures Pritchard’s corpse, and uses a proprietary technology to revive the old man, to make him young again, and to imbue him with superhuman strength and immunity, a vitality that Mary, the sick twin, will tap into through regular blood transfusions.

This all, of course, is a distraction from the real point of the show: the question of what Pritchard will do with his second chance. Will he clear his name? Will he regain the respect of his straight-arrow FBI agent son, Duval, who is operating under the assumption that his father committed suicide? And will he use that unearthly strength as a force for good in the city he still loves?

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Second Chance

Photo: Courtesy of 20th Century Fox Television

At least to that last question, the answer is: Hell yes. Freed from the annoying constraints that come with carrying a badge, Pritchard is able to dole out justice to a series of ridiculously villainous foes (one of them literally smears his face with blood and hoists a samurai sword) with a superhero’s efficiency and a cowboy’s swagger. And because the FBI seems to get called in on every policing matter in the city of Seattle, Pritchard frequently finds himself working the same cases as Duval, whom the show portrays as tiresomely hamstrung by matters of protocol and hobbled by his prissy refusal to trade favors with the city’s under-lords. The message comes across loud and clear: Methodical police work is for sissies; real men go rogue.

If Second Chance makes a virtue of flaunting the rules, NBC’s Shades of Blue sees doing so as an occupational hazard, a relatively benign necessity that’s fine in moderation. The show, which premieres this Thursday, opens with a tearful confession from Harlee Santos, an NPYD detective played by Jennifer Lopez. “I always wanted to be a good cop,” she laments, recording herself on her computer in the middle of the night. “But there’s no straight line to that. I always told myself that the end would justify the means. But now that I’m at the end, I can’t justify anything.”

So begins our journey into the just-below-the-surface world of crooked New York City cops. Santos, struggling single mother to a gifted teenage daughter, is part of a unit in Brooklyn run by Lieutenant Matt Wozniak (Ray Liotta), the man who long ago greased Santos’s path from good cop to bad, by assisting her in framing a violent ex-boyfriend to ensure he’d be locked up. Wozniak’s crew operates a tight ship: Business owners pay graft to police for protection; drug lords enjoy a certain amount of immunity if they stay in line; and cops, prosecutors, and internal affairs investigators all watch out for their own when things go awry.

In the two weeks leading up to Santos’s late-night mea culpa, things go very awry. Santos and her rookie partner, Michael Loman (Dayo Okeniyi), are on the trail of a renegade drug dealer whose bad heroin killed two people. They’re investigating suspicious activity in an apartment where they think they might find the dealers. Then shots ring out from inside and Loman spooks and kicks in the door, guns blazing. When the smoke clears, it’s evident that he’s killed one of the suspects, an unarmed black man.

It’s a familiar scenario, as by now is the cover-up that follows in short order: “The truth is in the paperwork,” Santos informs Loman pragmatically, retrieving the dealer’s gun and using it to shoot her partner without warning, lending credibility to the story they’ll peddle that the perp shot first, and simultaneously initiating the wide-eyed Loman (who is not seriously harmed) into the way police work really goes down.

That cover-up is quickly subsumed by the real drama of the show: When Santos is caught by the Feds accepting a pay off, she is forced to become their informant in a broader case they’re building against Wozniak. Her survival is dependent on maintaining the trust of her increasingly suspicious boss, whom she adores, and delivering tips to a lascivious, creepy FBI agent, whom she loathes, and who, though on the right side of the law, may have the least personal integrity of all the show’s many ethically compromised characters.

Shades of Blue is Law and Order meets Scandal. It’s at once a police procedural and a high-drama soap opera. Like Law and Order, it’s about the day-to-day minutia of detective work. Like Scandal, the show is anchored by a preternaturally talented female character (Harlee Santos will remind you why JLo was a revelation in Out of Sight), and predicated on her crackling chemistry with a constellation of mysterious men: The sexually omnivorous, mercurial Wozniak; Robert Stahl (Warren Kole), the stalker-y FBI agent running her case; James Nava, the sexy DA she’s keeping close as a tactical move.

It’s only when the crooked cops get greedy that the system breaks down. Even as we watch all the characters in Shades of Blue become mired indelibly in an increasingly complex web of lies, as we watch them tear apart their lives trying to maintain an impossibly delicate balance, the show seems to maintain that there’s nothing wrong with a little bit of corruption, so long as the greater good is served.

The only critique of that notion comes from Loman, who is African-American, who hails from the neighborhood he polices, and who, therefore, can’t so easily forget the man he killed. “With all due respect, sir, I don’t get to move on the way you do,” he tells Wozniak. “I’m a black cop that shot a black man playing a video game.”

“Whose bad heroin killed two people,” Wozniak reminds him.

“I didn’t know that,” Loman spits back. “We don’t get to fight a preemptive war. We don’t get to pop people because of what they’re going to do.”

In police work, in other words, the ends can’t justify the means. Though on TV, more often than not, they do just that.